Teleimmersive Archeology

Gregorij Kurillo1, Ruzena Bajcsy, Maurizio Forte2 and Oliver Kreylos3

We are developing a collaborative application for archeology that will allow archaeologists from remote locations to interact in real time through a shared virtual environment using teleimmersive technology [1]. The collaborative application for archeology features distributed scene graph which is built on top of the collaborative virtual reality framework [2]. The application allows users to load 3D objects of archeological artifacts and attaching them to different segments of the scene. The scene is represented by hierarchically organized scene graph which supports optimized rendering and interaction capabilities. The changes to the scene graph are transferred in real time via a network server which also updates the location of all the users in the space in the client applications. Thus the users can load, delete or move 3D objects or attach them to different coordinate systems inside a shared virtual environment. Each user navigates and interacts independently with the virtual environment in the first person perspective while geographically distributed users are represented by their 3D reconstructed avatars. As the remote user moves through the space, his/her 3D avatar travels accordingly. At any time, individual users can switch to the other user’s point of view or select face-to-face view for direct conversation. This learning platform will teach users how to interpret, reconstruct and communicate archaeological datasets using all the information available in a virtual participatory form, for instance, photos, movies, maps, 3D models, spatial data and texts [3][4]. In the future, we will study the utility of interactions with avatar/no avatar versus first person interaction. Finally, the study and analysis of a virtual reconstruction process in archaeology will help the virtual community to re-contextualize and reassemble spatial archaeological data sets, from the first draft version (data not yet interpreted) to the final communicative level.

Figure 1: Remote users interact with the virtual world through their 3D avatars generated in real time by multiple stereo cameras.